Now, Pilar, the floor is yours.
Pilar Rico, most of you already know her.
Mainly everyone here knows her.
She is the Unity Boss of Open Science of AFECI.
She is Associate Teacher of UNED.
She is a Government Doctor in Public
Administration by the Complutense University.
And she supports the Science Innovation Ministry of Spain.
In the national and European politics of Open Science,
focus on the open access repositories, the scientific
information market and the academic information.
At the international level, she is a national
representative from Spain in the EOCB board,
in the expert group of the European Commission
of National Points of Reference of Open Science,
and in the Committee of Investigation Infrastructures.
She has participated in many projects, seven specifically of FD,
and 2020 Horizon, among which we can remark EOS Future from 2021 to 2024.
And now she is participating in three
projects of Europe Horizon Diamant.
Open access policy models to advance
scholarship communication, EOSTRAIL and ALMACY.
EOSTRAIL and ALMACY until 2027.
So, whenever you want, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much. Thank you for the introduction.
Can I have my presentation there, with the slides? Ok, thank you.
Well, good morning everyone. Thank you UNED for
the invitation to participate in this Congress
and to talk about the European Union
of Investigation Data, the known EOS,
that is a polysemic concept and is complex
to understand from different points of view.
So, my goal here today is to help you to understand what this means.
Yes, what EOS means, what are the implications for the libraries tasks
and how it impacts us as such a national organization.
I always like to explain what is FECID,
this institution that I represent,
and explain the role that we represent in
each task that we talk about in public.
We are an institution of the state or public sector
and we depend on the science and innovation ministry.
And our main task is to implement at a practical level
the strategic decisions that are made in the ministry.
The ones marked by the international context, as
for example the European Union of Investigation,
and as the ones made by the ministry.
We land in specific services and tasks with these
strategic movements that are decided above us.
We are a young institution, a very new institution.
We were created in the same year as
ANECA, but we have a juridical formula
and we were born as an institution, as a foundation.
We are still working 140 people, with a medium
age, just like mine, but I'm not saying how old.
And we manage a public budget of 13 million.
This budget comes from the state funding,
and from funding that we obtain through European projects,
because we are part of this group of agents
that participate in coordination actions
and participation actions financed by the European Commission.
What is IOSC?
IOSC is an initiative that the European
Commission started in the year 2020.
by the European Council to generate an
ecosystem of generation preservation,
gathering, governance, accessibility and
reproduction of the investigation data.
similar to the academic publications, but led by public institutions.
It means that, taking into account the
situation on which we found ourselves
because of the will of the commercial sector,
the European Commission decides that the
investigation data are a result of the research,
that it's even more valuable than the research themselves,
and the problems that we are trying to solve within
the market of scientific research cannot be reproduced.
So, it decides to lead the generation
of this ecosystem of investigation data
from the very first minute when they discover the situation,
and then they start the construction of this European research area.
For the ones of you that don't know the European
organizations, the three main institutions are
Parliament, the Council and the Commission.
The Council is the representation of the Member States.
There, we can see represented the meetings of every minister.
The ECOFIN is the meeting of the Economic and Finance Ministers.
The one of the configuration is from Science Ministries.
It is also called Council, but it is the Science and Geology Council.
So, the Council has different configurations
that answer to different ministry structures.
So, Council, each of the Presidencies of
the Council that are done each three months,
many of you might remember the Spanish Presidency
that was in the second semester of 2023.
Each of the countries that are the head of
the Council, they remark a different aspect.
Their head in 2020, they decide to remark the building
of the European Investigation State, the known ERA.
And they start some priorities.
One of them, in the last ERA roadmap, we had two priorities,
but the first one of them is Open Science/European Open Science Club.
This gives us an idea of how wide and
how important is it at a strategic level.
This is the launch of the European Open Science Club.
And the European Commission, that is the executive agent,
because it is the ministers of the European Union,
they decide to start 1,000 million Euros to
fund the new European Investigation Area.
500 million for one program and 500 million
for Horizon Europa, that is the other program.
In some places you see 1 billion Euros, because that is
the difference in how we say it in Spanish and in English.
What does it mean billions in Spanish and English?
In Spanish it is 1,000 million and in English it is 1 billion.
So, it is 1 billion. And here we can
see how and why it is what explains it.
Because it is a concept, it makes sense, we are generating
an ecosystem of communication and scientific data,
but the how complicates a little the understanding of it.
The Commission decides that it is going to finance the building of
it through this 1 billion Euros executed by the Framework Programmes,
the ones that finance the programmes.
This is the scheme that the Commission
presents to show us the structure.
It is structured in three pillars.
Pillar 1, Excellent Science.
Pillar 2, Global Challenge and European Structural Competitiveness.
And Pillar 3, Innovative Europe.
And then a third pillar that is Widening Participation
and Strengthening of the European Research Area.
Here is where we can found the European projects, but this
one, circled by a red line, is the Research Infrastructure.
What does this mean?
This Research Infrastructure is one of the most technical programmes.
It has a huge component of participation of investigation groups
that are structured through the S3 ecosystem and the Rx ecosystem.
Because it is structured in destinations.
Destination 5 is the one founded by InfraEars.
It means all the projects want to
create this new European Research Area.
Let's make an example.
It is like people, research people decide that they are going to
create the national crisis through investigation research projects.
So they found a project for UNED, another for the Completely University, another
for the Murcia University, so that this national crisis can be generated.
So this is similar, but a huge scale, with the difference
that the European projects are always working together.
They are never individual projects.
We need at least two member states and one associated state in
order to create this group financed by the European Commission.
So here in destination 5 we can see who is financing
the construction of this data European Commission.
This funding, when we write the specific lines, the calls and the specific topics
that are going to be funded, we do it through a juridic keyword that is called here.
"Partenariado Tocoprogramado".
This means that this is a way of managing
decision making because we have many of them.
What it means, this "partenariado", is that there are many parts
taken into account in decision making in a specific element.
And when talking about them, this whole concept means that there is a co-programmation, that
the topics and the calls finance, but these 500 million Euros are decided by three parts.
The European Commission, the state members and the beneficiaries.
These three parts, they work together, they fight a lot and they decide if 100
million goes to this call or to this other call that I think is more important.
So they discuss about this.
The European Commission is represented, it
is not going to be easy, by two directions.
The DG Connect and the DG RTG through the DGT4 of OpenSales.
The representation of member states are sitting in the steering board and
here these are the ministries that have competences in making decisions.
In this case, our Ministry of Science
and Innovation and CFI as an alternative.
Because we always have a main person and an alternative person that
supports them and substitutes them when the first person cannot assist.
And this is the reason why I am here, because I am
the alternative representing Spain in this program.
And then we have the association that starts to make it difficult to understand
the EU because it starts to transform it to polysemic when it has the same name.
The EU Association is a non-profit association to which any researcher can apply and join,
paying a quote of 10,000 Euros for full participation and 5,000 Euros for half participation.
Where the applied parts make decisions and are the ones that can ask for funding
for the different convocatories inside the program of investigation and research.
So they all work together and they write the working
programs to which we all apply for to obtain the funding.
So it's not the commission that is working by itself and trying
to choose with the member states who this funding goes for.
But there is a third party and that's why we
talk about a co-program, three-party program.
There are different configurations of this, but this is the main one.
When we create, or when this EU steering board is created, at the beginning of the EU's creation
in 2020, the priorities drawn and shared and designed as part of the discussion are four.
These four here. First one is how to generate data that are compressible,
how to make them research objects, what we call investigation data.
Then is the relationship with the private sector.
This was part of the most complex discussion inside this program because we all need the
support of private sectors to the development of our activities in the public sector.
But the relocation of the role of these private sectors was a main
debate at the beginning of the EU's generation of research data.
Under a fair predicament, it meant to be fair in any discipline about which we
had to make any decision and how to monitor the constitution of open science.
This was the first debate and about this we have political papers that are
published and it's open access material in the webs of the members of this program.
But the discussion, it started to go in different paths.
Once these four pillars that I talked about, the
discussion went to other more pragmatic spheres.
The association started an important leadership as a pen holder inside the discussions and as an agenda
manager because the interest to structure the working programs of the calls of the infra-years was huge.
Because they represented the research community
that wanted to apply for this investigation project.
Now the association has 257 members, it is a wide representation.
From them, 138 are full members with a 10,000 quote.
It's just that there are 138 full members because
it doesn't make sense to all be full members.
And 91 are observers and 28 are mandated.
These are the representatives of each country, are the institutions that
represent each country inside EOSC and they try to manage the national will.
Because when we talk about big investigation infrastructures, we have two
elements that can define our infrastructures or our investigation interests.
It is the specific discipline and our belonging to a huge infrastructure that we are part of a specific project that we have an
international community that shares interests with us or our national priorities based on national visibility, return of the frame program.
That is one of the main goals of all the ministers of all the member
states and the returns of the scientific community of the frame programs.
So, these mandated organizations try to manage
the national will inside the association.
In Spain, the mandated organization is ESSE. That was one of the four
organizations that were in the creation of the European Committee on Data.
There are 13 Spanish institutions with a huge representation and we have one person, Spanish, Nacho
Blanca, from the Valencia University that is part of the government structure of the EOSC association.
He got this job by voting and he manages the will of the Spanish beneficiaries
inside the association in order to make visible our Spanish programs here.
I would like to talk a little bit about what it means open science in the
library world and in the scientific community world of big infrastructures.
You know that the open access concept comes from the libraries and then is transformed because
of reasons we talked about in a huge concept that is open science that covers all the research.
When the Commission accepts in the era of construction that the European Union of Data and
Open Science are the same, I am not saying this, the era is the era of roadmaps saying this,
when we talk about open science, we talk about EOSC and when they talk about
funding of open science, mainly they defend funding given to EOSC creation.
In that moment, libraries, they have or at least they are put apart from the conversation, they stop being the only agent that is referred
by this meaning and they start to share space with scientific communities that work in specific services in the European generation of data.
And I am talking about European agencies working in
artificial intelligence or data species and so on.
When EOSC is transformed, it is the same in some context as open science, the libraries start to be
not as important as the scientific communities and they do not always know how to share this space.
And I would like that one of the results of this conversation today would be that we would look at ourselves in our own
field and that we would understand that we all have to work together because who is named by the investigation program,
it is not the libraries but it is the researchers and the investigation community, so the
agent understands what it means to write a call in some terms or in others, it changes.
For libraries it is difficult for us to understand the difference between specific technical aspects in the writing of the calls, but we
can work all together with all scientific communities for these disciplines so that the support of the library is essential and important.
And the understanding and the expert understanding of the content of these calls rests on the
people that are able to do something in the benefit of the whole science and technology world.
In this context, as part of our experience being members of the association, we have seen that many of the institutions participating in the association had as a representative people from the
libraries and we have seen that other institutions had as representatives the researchers and these ones had more ability to do the task forces and to contribute effectively to the configuration.
of these work programs.
So then they are the ones getting the awards, if I can say so.
The association writes in year 2021 the ESRIA, that is the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda,
that is a document with which we present the priorities of funding that have to go to the work programs.
It is a document for four years, that reaches year 2027, that is when
Horizonte Europa and European Horizon finish and we start the new program.
And this four-year strategy is being understood in different
documents that are the MAR, the multi-annual roadmap.
Now we are working with the document
prepared by the association, let me explain.
The people asking for aids, they write the strategy and they create a discussion
of the member states and scientific community that are the ones with the money.
But other beneficiaries that say give the money to these things that I am saying and they write it in the
ESRIA, that it is a four-year strategy and then it is written in the multi-annual roadmap that is two years.
Here is the association members that write this document.
I would like you to think about the real capacity
of the libraries to prioritize specific fundings.
In documents such as this one, we need to collaborate with our research teams because they are the
ones that are going to write the calls and the proposals and they are the ones obtaining funding.
And what the multi-annual roadmap 2024 says is that the
tasks are going to be structured in three different stages.
First is the development of infrastructures that already exist because the first initiatives of 2020 are first
to identify which are the generation of the investigation data spaces that we have in the European space data.
Who creates data? Which entities work in
the generation of the investigation data?
Then identify these infrastructures, these ESRIs,
Erics, national infrastructures, which ones?
What are their governance? What are their preservation protocols?
And investigation data open access have and how do they
open their access to the other scientific institutions?
So that all these institutions are as similar as possible.
We in libraries, we reassure our data are fair and at an institutional level, they must reassure that all these infrastructures
are interoperable at a government level, at a level of producing, preserving, give access and I maintain this investigation data.
It is a philosophy similar to what we apply at
the libraries but at an institutional level.
All these actions were financed by the
eight-prime program that is already closed.
The first goal was to federate these infrastructures and in order to
federate them we have to have an agreement on the elements I talked about.
The second step is to create added value and this is about
the debate about the role of commercial services providers.
And the third is expansion to develop impact from open science.
So this debate is an open debate but in some way, somehow the expert group
tries to up her pace in this open science concept and we do not agree with this.
And here is an example, you can see the working program
of the destination five of IFRA years 2023 and 2024.
So that you can see that all the priorities were gathered
in Zria and in Mar and they were directly to specific calls.
Call 01 or IFRA years 2023, 02, 03,
all are translated from Zria and Mar.
This could be an example for you to see the
real impact and now you have to trust really.
But what I want to share here is that all these priorities that
the association defined as essential for the start of the report,
they ended up by being specific calls of those 500
million Euros that we have to share in European horizon.
And here we have a logo swap of the projects
that were financed by the call of years 2020.
I will not add all of them but so that you can see how
all of them put it inside their name, the word EOSC.
So, in order to keep on contributing to
this polysemic condition of the EOSC world.
Because let's remember that it's an initiative of
the European Commission supported by the Council.
It's a three-party program, it's an association, it's a steeling work
and it's all the projects that have been financed by the destination
five IFRA years in horizon 2020 and in horizon Europe.
And here we have EOS Nordic, EOS Pilar, EOS Life, EOS Secretariat.
EOS Secretariat was the origin of the support
of the structure of the EOS organization.
And in Europe horizon, Horizonta Europa, you can find this information in the
webpage where we have all the projects financed by IFRA years and Europe horizon.
And all of them, as you can see, have
the EOSC word inside their names.
The ones with the association logo, they are participating
by the association because in this case the association.
is part and jury of the cause in this case.
And this construction, this creation, the consortiums
that create these projects, they develop their own agenda.
So, one of the discussions that we're talking about in the Steeling
Board is if it is good or not to start an infrastructure as wide as this.
So, we have three investigation projects with international consortiums that end up by developing
their own international interests and their own agenda inside the consortium and beyond.
This is something that we can see clearly with other initiatives such
as financing of big infrastructures through the Erics legal structure,
that they end up by seeing independent infrastructures and the
sustainability of their service depends on this external financing.
This generates financings to be able to sustain
these objectives, these goals at a long term.
So, with EOS this is what happens and this is one of the debates
that we have opened right now inside the discussion of this program.
The Spanish participation, you can see it here, is high in
this association but about the return of the previous project,
it is also high in the number of beneficiary entities where we find 6%
and we had the result in July this year from all the projects financed.
There are a total of 963 institutions, a total of 56% of these institutions
are Spanish, but we just participate in the 6% of the projects.
It means that we participate in little projects
but many Spanish institutions participate.
Why? Because there are many institutions that participate in many
projects because sometimes we are third parties or associated parties
and also we have two entities that are coordinators of
two projects of EOS Siesta and EOS Tidán that are here,
you can see them here, here in the right and
left down corners, EOS Siesta and EOS Tidán.
I guess the launching meetings will be in January
because they will be signing the agreements.
and we have two important projects that are coordinating in
Spain but the presence of our institutions is yet to be in place.
Yet, right now we have five open debates, all of them are
complex inside the discussions of the three-party program,
Commission, Member States and Association.
They discuss on these matters in the meetings that we make, that we do.
The first is relation of EOS with data
spaces, we are going to talk about this.
Second is what is the model that is going to be
maintained beyond 2027 in the 10th frame program.
and this discussion affects all the configuration of the frame
market because the parties have not been as useful as we hoped
and that the co-programmation is not enough.
There are other options such as co-financing of these co-partners, options
that are liked by countries that have a better budget for financing.
Others that have legal models inside the
European Commission like joint undertaking,
it is a shared effort where the different providers can enter to
create a huge infrastructure that is dedicated to one specific matter.
Or mixed models where society has a main role.
This is a discussion that took us to complicated places
because the Association looks for governance models.
that guarantee their long-term sustainability and the Commission asks for
the right to get away from the Association once the background is designed.
because they don't want to be linked to
the decision agenda of the Association,
mainly when it does not represent all of the actors, it represents
some of them and the ones that can pay this huge 10,000 Euros quote.
Not all the associations can pay this, not all the associations
can relate to this paying in order to decide space.
The other one is the relation with the ESFRI working group, it is one of the spec
groups of the European Commission that has a work trajectory that is very important
and in some way the expert group of the
Steering Board is getting tasks away from them.
The other one is EOSC Monetarisation
and the other one is EOSC Federation.
This is the one that you might have had some
information or some comments or some position in place.
I'm going to go back to the beginning again so that
we can understand what is our role as a library,
how can we contribute to the European Union.
In some way we enter here, you have the
option to contribute through the Association,
in case of being members of the Association,
the Union is not, but here there is,
or it is not, but there are other associations that are
not unit, through the Association or through the Ministry.
You can be part of the decision making of what is going to be financed.
And then the debates, we have the power of inviting experts
in the different food configurations inside the Steering Board
so that they help us to see elements that we cannot
see because they are part of the day-to-day work,
of the expert work of different collectives.
Inside this Steering Board there is a Policy Sub-group, a
Deputy Group and there is this other Committee Sub-group.
This group is a technical group because, I don't know
if you know, the heads of the Council work in ETHERED.
So the group now is made by Spain, Belgium and Hungary.
We are like these three groups that work together, and
we were working with France, Czech Republic and Sweden,
and now we are working with the ones that I said now.
In each state we work in, let's say, couples of three, so that we
don't lose the trustability of the decisions that are being taken.
So whoever is in any point of these three
groups, they are able to participate.
So coming back to data spaces, one of the debates that
is most important, and it's open but not yet closed,
is how the construction of the European data with
all this economical mobilization, decision-making,
this huge complex governance as I tried to explain with
multiple agents and multiple agendas and strategic alliances,
in bilateral meetings to try to manage the
meetings, how this, that is already so complex,
it is related to the initiatives that are already
working, that are well-articulated initiatives,
and that they try to work through the Member
States and that they are persistent initiatives.
The most difficult one is the one about health data, because they are
committed to important elements related to the protection data regulation.
This is something very difficult for the
communities working in this sequence.
It is difficult already at a local level and a national level, so imagine
at a transnational level in the European space, it is so difficult.
So the steering boards decided to initiate with
the health data space to relate to it and say,
"Let's check what are you doing with your health data and
let's see what can we do and let's see how can we help you.".
The conversation went on difficult paths, so it has not evolved a
lot, but well, they are still in this conversation working on it.
The second is EOS monetarization. At the moment
it is called monetarization of open science.
We don't want EOS to be open science because we know
that open science implies that it is not inside EOS,
so we try that open science is the surname and not the name,
and this is a fight that cannot seem as important, but it is.
We cannot forget about the main part, the
main part that is public-politic creation.
So if we accept this open science, some will lose and some will
win in this group collective work about science is a task for all.
So all this information was given by one
of the finance projects that is EOS Future.
So as I was saying before, the commission gives
money to the projects, the projects construct EOS,
and then between the three agents of the project we use
the services and we give them like a long-term sense.
And one of the most important results of this
EOS Future was the creation of monitoring.
And its sustainability is committed by new
financing funds. Everything is a little difficult.
And the most important debate, and I have five minutes
yet, and then I'm going to stop, is the Nodos Federation.
And the big question that we all have is what is a node?
Nodes are national, nodes are automatic, they
can be transnational, and I give you an example,
a dumb example for you to understand. A node can be a gathering
where all the national repositories will be represented.
Open-air node. What is a node? It's open-air, it's a repository.
How many times are we going to be represented?
Every infrastructure in this investigation node,
if we are part of OPERAS, for example, that is
inside the SCREAM roadmap, if it is part of OPERAS,
with their associated services, it's already
federated in EOS because OPERAS is part of EOS,
but if OPERAS is going to support Open
Research Europe, and OPERAS is already there,
Open Research Europe is also a node. Well, there are many questions.
And as I was saying before, who has the power
to write, who took the pen with the association?
And the association made a handbook about Nodos Federation
for years, and they put this handbook to public trial.
This is closed, it was open before summer, it had a big acceptance.
One of the discussions that we had during
the meetings was, do not open it in August,
because in Spain August is holidays.
But anyways, it was open, and here you have,
this slide is a screenshot of the EOS
association where they marked the milestones,
where they committed in the meetings
to achieve the public advisories made.
We have data and we are analyzing it now in
order to agree on the definition of nodo,
and who were the first nodos federated in EOS.
We do not expect any Spanish entity that is prepared to federate a nodo,
but here we have to make a strategic decision, that is,
sometimes you come first and you are the rule maker,
because you are able to say, this works and
this not, and everyone else has to adapt,
but other times you are the first one and
maybe you have to do everything by yourself.
In this case, the Spanish community had a weak
maturity level in comparison with other countries,
other infrastructures, in order to be part
of the first EOS in the nodos federation.
So, because of this, we are not expecting, but this might change,
but right now we are not expecting any Spanish
infrastructure that is federated as a nodo.
But for you as a library, what is important
and I would like you to keep in mind,
that we, through our certification services, we are keeping a
space to be able to federate inside EOS when this is possible.
It is not yet possible because of all the
obstacles that we had to pass through,
and that I tried to transmit during my talk, and also because
we don't really know how can we land in this federation
and what are the conditions that we have to accomplish.
But what we know is that our Open Science
International Strategy, in the first of the four axes,
talking about digital infrastructures,
in the last of the measures of this X,
is to generate digital infrastructures in the Open Science.
And for that we use our financing
services, we finance systems, repositories,
platforms of publication, publication
platforms, that is also important,
and we try that they are ready so that in
the moment that we are prepared for this,
we can federate, but we don't really know this yet.
But to do that, all the community of
open community platforms have good basis,
and our build solid is our labor here.
So, our task is to guarantee that this infrastructure works,
so that when this federation is open we do not lose
the opportunity, but we are ready to participate.
That's it. Thank you very much.
I'm going to abuse Vilar's confidence
to say that if you have any questions,
maybe you can talk about them over breakfast or pause time,
because we're going to keep on having
more delay if we wait here any longer.
So, over the coffee break, you can ask those questions,
and that's on the first floor in the library. Thank you.
Thank you.